Woman places ads asking for kidney donation

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MOSES LAKE, Wash. -- A Moses Lake woman is so desperate for a new kidney, her family has taken out ads in the paper asking for help. They just need one-person to offer that life-saving gift.

Megan Dunnagan is just 29 but she spends four hours a day, five days a week, tethered to a dialysis machine. It's keeping her alive. Dialysis filters her blood as her kidney slowly fails.

"When you don't have a kidney, no kidneys, this is what you have to do," explains Megan.

She nearly died at birth. Her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck twice. The fall out was a hole in her heart and damage to her kidneys. Back then, that meant an infant on dialysis. Megan's mother was able to give her a kidney when she was a toddler.

Megan says, "They didn't even think it would work. They didn't think I would live past 5-days old even if I got a transplant they thought my parents were pretty much crazy."

But it did work. For 14-years. That kidney began failing as Megan was a teenager. She's been on the dialysis machine ever since. Megan knows she's running out of time. The dialysis has taken its toll on her veins. She has a plastic-type straw in her arm to keep flushing her blood.

Megan points out, "There's nothing else they can put in my body when this graft decides to fail."

That's when Megan could die. And that's where you come in. She needs a kidney donor. She can only take one from someone with type "O" blood (positive OR negative), so finding a donor is that much more difficult. Only a small percent of the population may be a match.

Megan and her family have placed a few newspaper ads in the Tri-City Herald and the Spokesman Review, hoping to get donors. They've had a few responses but so far, nobody's been a match.

Megan's boyfriend, Armando Gomez, dutifully helps administer her treatments, "Some days are harder than others, but you gotta take the bad with the good."

Megan hopes to marry that dedicated man one day. And she'd love to help children, maybe even be a foster mom. She's not giving up hope that match is out there.

"I'm lucky just to have dialysis that will keep me alive until that kidney comes."

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This magnetic storm is HUGE, and still going. Has reach KP 8 today. Would have stayed later to keep filming, but the clouds moved in. Let's hope it persists into the evening tonight also for more pictures.